For The Book Obsessed
Should you read that book you’ve had your eye on? Will it totally rock or sink like a stone? Check out these book reviews from book lovers like you to help you find your next great read!
[ad_1] Since her connection with American and European surrealist groups of the 1960s (Arsenal, Phases) Rikki Ducornet has deployed tactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit. Ducornet’s early novels form … Read more
[ad_1] I was first introduced to Kirstin Valdez Quade’s writing in a graduate workshop, when the professor led a discussion on the short story “Nemecia,” from her debut collection Night at the Fiestas. Since then, I return to this story whenever I reach the distinct point of writer’s block where I need to remind myself … Read more
[ad_1] Welcome to another installment of a collaboration between the Chicago Review of Books and the Your Favorite Book podcast. Malavika Praseed, frequent CHIRB contributor and podcast host, seeks to talk to readers and writers about the books that light a fire inside them. What’s your favorite book and why? This week’s guest is Morgan … Read more
[ad_1] Yemeni American poet and translator Threa Almontaser won the 2020 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets for her brilliant debut poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen. Her poems touch on young rebellion, the thin veil of protection a language grants you, and how history is often stored in the body. … Read more
[ad_1] In a powerful essay for The Nation, Toni Morrison recalled “feeling helpless” in 2004’s political climate. A friend called, cheering her. “This is precisely the time when artists go to work,” he said. “Not when everything is fine, but in times of dread.” Morgan Jerkins has already shown herself as a writer who goes to work … Read more
[ad_1] Across his fiction, journalism, and letters, Fyodor Dostoevsky spoke in many voices. He spoke as a radical who would face mock execution and years in prison for plotting against the tsar. He spoke as a Russian Orthodox believer excoriating liberal society for its smallness and lack of faith. He spoke as a prophet carrying … Read more
[ad_1] As primarily a reader of fiction, I am wary of non-fiction that attempts to encompass an entire city in a single book. I can’t help but begin with a maximally heightened sense of caution; a complete image of a city seems so unlikely as to dissuade attempts in the first place. Usually, I am … Read more
[ad_1] The title of Raymond Antrobus’s debut collection, The Perseverance, derives from the name of the London pub the poet’s father used to frequent, an establishment whose doors were shut upon young Raymond, with “50 p. to make [him] disappear,” many an afternoon. Deaf from birth, the boy would stand in front of this everyday … Read more
[ad_1] “I saw my mother raise a man from the dead,” Libertie Sampson tells us at the beginning of Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel. Libertie is a young girl living with her mother, a trained physician, in a community of free Blacks in Brooklyn, and the man is an escaped slave she calls Mr. Ben who … Read more
[ad_1] After a storytelling show a couple of years ago, years after the Weinstein news was everywhere, I mentioned to a group of women who gathered around me after my performance that I had been sexually assaulted twice in my twenties. My point wasn’t to discuss my harm. My point, I went on to tell … Read more